After the UPS market returned to growth in 2016, momentum continued into 2017 as the market picked up steam, growing at a rate of 3.6% to just under $7.7 billion. The Americas region remained relatively flat in 2017; cloud and colocation growth was subdued as space and power continued to be leased from large buildouts which occurred in 2016. EMEA grew at mid-single digit levels due to widespread growth from cloud and colocation service providers ,on-premises enterprise data center modernization and even industrial applications. Asia grew at the fastest rate, also due to a broad range of applications and end users, notably driven by local UPS suppliers such Huawei, Kehua and Kstar. Global market growth is projected to continue in 2018 and through 2020, at rates of low to mid-single digits. The growth from cloud and colocation service providers will play a big role in that, as well as new trends developing in the data center industry that will affect the growth potential of the UPS market, such as distributed compute and lithium-ion battery adoption.

On 2 August 2018, Arm announced the acquisition of data management firm Treasure Data and the launch/re-branding of its IoT platform as “Pelion”. It reportedly acquired Mountain View, CA-based Treasure Data for about $600 million, making it one of the largest acquisitions in Arm’s history. At a time when the large, diverse IoT platform vendor landscape is slowly starting to consolidate, and many vendors are starting to focus more narrowly on the areas where they can differentiate, Arm is taking a contrarian approach by going full-stack, and broadly-horizontal.

As smart functionality makes its way into homes and businesses, two devices are gaining a foothold into broader ecosystems to maximize growth and revenue opportunities: smart speakers and smart meters.

Arm has acquired Stream Technologies and will add the company to Arm’s IoT Service Group to extend the Mbed Device Management Platform with connectivity services/service management capabilities. Arm acquired Stream Technologies primarily to further Arm’s end-to-end connectivity and device management platform that helps organizations manage the complexity of connecting hundreds of billions of future IoT devices. The acquisition enhances Arm’s strategic positioning in the IoT market, provided that Arm can successfully execute on leveraging the potential synergies between Arm’s resources and Stream Technologies’ technical capabilities.

In the most recent competitor database, smart home companies were analyzed across several factors including the number of connected consumer devices by segment (climate control, energy & water, lighting, security and consumer electronics) , smart speaker compatibility, company size and platform.

In late April of this year, T-Mobile US announced plans to merge with its domestic competitor, Sprint Corporation. This is the third time a merger between the third- and fourth-largest US wireless service providers has been proposed. Last year’s deal attempt ended due to a dispute over who would control the combined business entity.

IHS Markit illustrates how an automaker might make use of various types of IoT platforms to offer enhanced services to its customers, enable closer collaboration with its suppliers, and develop new partnerships with other industry stakeholders.

LASER World of PHOTONICS CHINA 2018, the largest exhibition for the laser and photonics industries in Asia, was held 14-16 March in Shanghai, and the exhibition set a new record with nearly 56,000 visitors this year.

There was heightened buzz around the topic of AI at the 24th European Congress of Radiology, with many vendors citing the integration of data through AI as the next big trend – but what’s new? AI has been discussed at the show for several years, and each year there is more and more uncertainty around its integration into medical devices.

There is no lack of confusing discussions about the need for small cells in 5G. Each time this topic is brought to me—and it comes up regularly these days—I ask the question: what is a 5G small cell? In fact, the most accurate way to look at this issue is 5G needs small cell topology knowledge and expertise to conduct successful rollouts in frequencies above 6 GHz. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

IoT, once again, was one of the hot topics/buzzwords at Mobile World Congress (MWC). Other technologies or concepts that got a lot of airtime in briefings and press releases were 5G, AI (artificial intelligence), (IoT) cybersecurity, network slicing and SD-WAN (software defined wide area network).
In this brief insight, we have picked out three developments that cut across three broad IoT-related themes we saw at MWC (and indeed previous events) namely: lowering the cost of IoT connectivity; reducing complexity for developers and enterprises in planning IoT projects and increased focus on generating value from IoT data

During Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 (Barcelona, February 26th to March 1st), 5G was the most discussed and highlighted topic. At MWC, almost all global telecommunications service operators announced their plans to deploy their 5G services commercially some as early as late 2018.